1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data communication over a network, and more specifically to the use of dynamic Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in a virtualized Ethernet environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
As businesses grow and diversify the types of services offered to their respective customers, the number of servers and applications required to service customers also increases. Traditionally, each server box provided a single service. Therefore, growth in the number of services meant an increase in the number of servers required to provide the services.
With the emergence of server partitioning, a single server can be made to run as if it were two or more servers. Server partitioning offers a number of advantages to information technology (IT) departments of growing businesses. For example, system administrators can consolidate multiple applications into a single server box, thereby centralizing management, saving space, and potentially lowering IT costs.
As virtualization and server partitioning become increasingly common, the level of virtualization, i.e., the number of logical systems concurrently executing in each server, will continue to increase. Each logical partition typically requires its own network connection. A network connection is typically established through a network interface device, for example, a network interface card (NIC) or network adapter. However, providing each partition with its own Ethernet adapter can be very expensive because of the cost of network adapter cards. Furthermore, Input/Output (IO) enclosures required to house the adapters may take valuable space on the server.
One solution is to develop a virtualized Ethernet adapter which is capable of supporting a plurality of partitions. A single virtualized Ethernet adapter may provide a plurality of virtual (logical) adapters and each partition may use one of the logical adapters. Each logical adapter requires a unique Media Access Control (MAC) address. Traditionally, Ethernet adapters had MAC addresses permanently burned into the adapter, providing a unique MAC address for each physical port of the adapter. The virtualized Ethernet adapter requires a unique (MAC) address for each logical adapter in use. However, the actual number of MAC addresses required may not be known because the number of partitions of the server may dynamically change over time.
Prior art solutions for providing MAC addresses to logical adapters include allocating a sufficient number of MAC addresses to each virtualized Ethernet adapter to support the maximum number of logical partitions which may be serviced by the adapter. Each MAC address must be purchased from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). One problem with the prior art is that many of the MAC addresses will remain unused because most servers employ far fewer partitions than the maximum number of partitions supported. As the number of partitions supported by servers grows from tens to hundreds to thousands of partitions per server, the cost of acquiring MAC addresses for each partition will become prohibitive.
Another prior art solution is to employ user-defined MAC addresses instead of unique MAC addresses provided by IEEE. The advantage of this approach is that any number of partitions can be supported by the virtualized Ethernet adapter. However, there are significant drawbacks to this approach. For example, because the user defined MAC addresses are not unique, one or more adapters may be allocated the same MAC addresses, resulting in network failures. Furthermore, the virtualized Ethernet adapter must be manually configured prior to usage to ensure uniqueness of the MAC addresses, thereby making network communication slower and inefficient. Moreover, an experienced network administrator may be required to perform such complex configuration, thereby increasing IT costs.
Accordingly, what is needed are methods, systems, and articles of manufacture for acquiring MAC addresses in a virtualized Ethernet environment.